Jonathan Spence has ascended to heaven on a dragon
Well, actually, that is how the death of the emperor was announced in the 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci film The Last Emperor, which came out just as I was starting ...
Category: Anecdotes
Internet Culture and Rough Music
Not really a post, but more of an idea. I ran across this, about victims of the alleged Las Vegas shooting who are being harassed on-line. I say alleged, becau...
Delayed Reaction, or, I get mail.
In response to my review of The Last Samurai movie, I got the following email yesterday: The text reads: Message From: your mom Message: I read your review of &...
Li Bai and the whale
One of the books I will be using in class this Fall is Sanyan Stories by Feng Menglong. In class we will be using the much condensed version from University of ...
Modern media culture was born in China. In 1931.
Did you know that Charles Lindbergh, the biggest media star of the 1930’s, went to China? Well, I didn’t. He was there in 1931, after he had become ...
Confucius say….
For many years I have wanted to find a fortune cookie that actually had a piece of paper with “Confucius Say:…” followed by an actual quote fr...
Chairman Xi serves the people
Offbeat China has some official cartoons showing Xi Jinping as an ordinary guy who can sit cross-legged just like folks. I guess now that Gary Locke has officia...
The Chinese are topsy-turvy
One common theme that turns up a lot in older Western writings on China is the idea that China is the opposite of the West. Just take our, normal, rational way ...
Mixing water with water
Here is a dialogue (from the Zuozhuan) I used in class this week. The Duke declares “It is Ju alone who is in harmony with me.” Yanzi replied, “Ju is in f...
A clash of symbols
In the introduction of Julia Lovell’s The Opium War she discusses an incident from November, 2010. David Cameron had gone to China, and it being November ...
History and hats
One book that I use in my classes is Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. The book is the story of William Tinkler, an Englishman wh...
Going Native
Here is something from Edward V. Gulick Teaching in Wartime China: A Photo-Memoir, 1937-1939. 1 When Gulick came to China he was a young, idealistic part of the...
A memory stirs..
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...
A memory stirs…
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...